From Ensor’s Curiosity Shop, Nightmares of Gruesome Beauty

Urban avant-gardist or small-town loony? The Belgian painter James Ensor, who has a survey of hilarious, gruesome beauty at the Museum of Modern Art, is a puzzle to fans and strangers alike, a classic insider-outsider.

He knew all the right art-world people but hated most of them and was sure they hated him. He was an aggrieved traditionalist with a pop-culture itch, equally entertained by Rubens and tabloid cartoons. He was a sophisticated artist who helped shape early Modernism, not in a Paris studio but in an attic room over a novelty shop in a resort town on the North Sea.

Although Ensor has long been a fixture in the art canon, he is also a fugitive presence. My guess is that a lot of people know his name without knowing quite who he is. Who can blame them? He’s hard to pin down. Gothic fantasist, political satirist, religious visionary: one minute he’s doing biblical scenes, the next the equivalent of biker tattoos, in a style that veers between crude and dainty.

Just consider his self-portraits. Within the span of five years in the late 1880s he depicted himself as a cross-dressed dandy, a rotting corpse, a bug, a fish, Albrecht Durer and a crucified Jesus. Clearly that attic room was a crowded, cacophonous place, and the MoMA show, though airily installed, puts us right inside it.

Ensor was born in Ostend, Belgium, in 1860, and his life began with uncertainties. His father, an Englishman, was probably an alcoholic and a bankrupt. The family’s main income came from the Ostend shop owned by his Belgian mother’s family, an antiques-and-souvenirs emporium selling china, taxidermic specimens and grotesque carnival masks.

Ensor studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, immersing himself in Bosch and Rembrandt, as well as in modern realists like Courbet and Manet. Goya and Turner, artists “obsessed with light and violence,” as he put it, became favorites. He aligned himself with a circle of painters who were politically leftist — anti-imperial, anti-clerical, pro-worker — and aesthetically progressive. In 1883 they formed a group called Les Vingt, or the 20, and organized a salon that drew contemporary artists from across Europe, including Monet and Seurat.

Ensor exhibited in the salon for a decade, but he had a bitter parting of ways when several of its members converted to neo-Impressionism, while he held firm to a dark-hued realist path. The early paintings at MoMA, crumbly still lifes and gravy-brown interiors, are in this style and get things off to a lugubrious start.

Most of the interiors are of Ensor’s family home. After a few years in Brussels, Ensor moved back to Ostend; he would never leave again for any extended period. He had many friends, and a long-term romantic attachment, but never married. His top-floor studio was over the shop, and from there he could look down on narrow streets and see beach and sea, and a grand expanse of sky.

The space was cramped, but that was O.K. It encouraged up-close, detailed work and led him to develop a method for making large-scale drawings from pasted-together sheets of paper. He brought lots of masks up from the shop, along with old clothes, and improvised models from them. With reproductions of art he admired, along with his own pictures, on the walls, and a human skull perched on his easel, the sources for his work were in place.

All these sources began to cohere in the painting called “The Scandalized Masks” from 1883, a kind of stripped-down, bad-dream version of a family portrait. A man sits at a bare table in a bleak room, a wine bottle at hand. A woman enters brandishing what looks like a flute or a stick. Both figures wear big-nosed masks. He cowers; she stares through dark-tinted spectacles. It is a chilling, hilarious moment in a drama that is also a farce, a Punch-and-Judy skit scripted by Zola. Death, in the guise of an avenging grandmother, comes to claim an incautious tippler.

Photo

James Ensor A retrospective of the painter continues through Sept. 21 at the Museum of Modern Art. Here, Self-Portrait With Masks (1899).Credit
Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan, Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York/Sabam, Brussels

Around the same time Ensor was painting from nature: cloud-filled landscapes, or skyscapes, filled with the North Sea’s churning weather. But these too implied threatening stories. In a painting called “Fireworks” the night sky is a curtain of fire. In “Adam and Eve Expelled From Paradise” the banishing angel explodes like a midair bomb. And there’s the extraordinary “Tribulations of Saint Anthony,” in which sky and sea dissolve into one great fetid pool.

All three pictures date from a single year, 1887, when some eschatological strain in Ensor’s thinking was reaching a fever pitch. A year later he would complete his grandest epic, “Christ’s Entry into Brussels” in 1889, which isn’t in the show. (It’s owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and didn’t travel.) But he had already produced, a few years earlier, drawings of comparable ambition and heat.

One, called “The Lively and Radiant: The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem,” from 1885, is gigantic: nearly seven feet tall and done on a giant piece of paper. The setting is an immense proscenium theater, which is also a city street, with an army of helmeted extras marching toward us, the panicked audience. Signs hang everywhere, advertising art (“Les Impressionistes”), commerce (“Charcutiers de Jerusalem”), politics (“Mouvement Flamand”) and celebration (“Hip hip hurrah”). In the middle of the tumult, like a tiny light, is Jesus riding an ass.

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An Ensor scholar could probably crack all the coding. And anyone who lingers over its scrim upon scrim of graphite lines will recognize a formal tour de force. But it’s more than that: it’s an entry point into conceptual and emotional realms with few clear guideposts. The drawing is, after all, absurd and freakish, like Rembrandt’s “Hundred Guilder Print” turned into wallpaper. Is the result in any way a devotional image? A social statement? A take-no-prisoners travesty?

Ensor didn’t say, but was convinced that the art world despised it. He was acutely sensitive to what he saw as a wholesale critical rejection of his art, impelled by a “viciousness beyond all known limits.” Much of his work from the late 1880s onward was a response to this perception, a statement of exultantly defiant martyrdom.

He depicted himself beheaded, dissected, nailed to the cross. In one tiny painting he becomes a pickled herring pulled apart by two grinning critic-skeletons. In an etching we see him urinating against a public wall on which is scrawled “Ensor est un fou” — “Ensor is a nut job.”

Oddly, gradually, his fortunes changed. In 1895 the Belgian government he mercilessly lampooned bought one of his early paintings. Collectors began to show interest. Writers said nice things. There were retrospectives. Ensor began to soften.

He spent time, as always, in his studio, hemmed in by masks and other props, mostly painting duplicates of his own past works, both to earn money and in the hope that, with copies, his art had a better chance of physically surviving. (He made prints for the same reasons.) In 1929 the king named him a baron. By the time he died in Ostend in 1949 he was a national hero.

I find this story of official adulation astonishing. Were people really looking at his art — at the death’s heads, the Jesus pictures, the figures of defecating rulers and ministers perched like crows on a fence — and understanding what they saw? Maybe it all made sense after the killing field that was World War I. Or were they clueless, or just uninterested, as many quick-looking viewers today may be, for whom Ensor is a piece of cultural arcana preserved beyond its useful time?

He will certainly never be popular. He’s as much a visionary as van Gogh and a far more imaginative neurotic than Edvard Munch. But he was inconsistent in matters of style and polish. And he didn’t paint a “Starry Night” or a “Scream.” What he did paint — basically a medieval dance of death choreographed in personal, topical modern terms — most of us don’t relate to or want to hear about, though I suspect some artists do.

The MoMA survey, which has been organized by Anna Swinbourne, an assistant curator at the museum, with Jane Panetta, and the art historian Susan M. Canning, is an artist’s-artist show. It will appeal to anyone trying to negotiate an insider-outsider perch, anyone obsessed by violence and light, anyone who knows that loony is relative, that art is reality seen from a high small place, that the distance from a joke to a shock to a prayer is short.

“James Ensor” continues through Sept. 21 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org; (212) 708-9400.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: From Ensor’s Curiosity Shop, Nightmares Of Gruesome Beauty. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe